There’s little doubt that Papandreou’s downfall owes most directly to the threat his referendum call presented to the bailout package, and the fury his move sparked amongst those Eurozone heavyweights whose private banking sectors had, and have, the most to lose from a Greek default. There are two ways to read Papandreou’s referendum bid. The first is to see it as the move of a socialist prime minister, forced into acquiescence with the EU and the IMF but naturally antipathetic towards the provisions of the debt deal and aware that a decisive majority of his own people have neither the appetite for more austerity nor any interest in the continued wellbeing of the Eurozone. The second is the rather less charitable interpretation of Costas Douzinas in today’s Guardian, for whom it represented ‘the irrational act of a regime that had lost touch with the people and was trying desperately to save its skin.’ It was ‘not a late recognition or a democratic redress of the repeated humiliations visited upon Greeks, or a reassertion of sovereignty against the IMF and Germany…[but] the government’s attempt to regain the initiative against its own people clamouring to see it exit the stage.’

Yet whichever interpretation one adopts, neither the Eurozone heavyweights nor Christine Lagarde’s IMF emerge from this affair looking especially virtuous. As Douzinas, reflecting legitimate Greek anger over both Papandreou’s humiliation by Merkel and Sarkozy and outside interference in Greek politics, observes, ‘the European involvement in this endgame is problematic’. The new coalition government is being formed to one end only – to approve the bailout package without recourse to an irritable Greek public – and it is being formed at the behest of the EU and the IMF. As the EU’s economic and monetary affairs commissioner Olli Rehn put it, ‘we have called for a national unity government and remain persuaded that it is the convincing way of restoring confidence and meeting the commitments.’ Given the parlous fiscal positions of Italy and other Eurozone member states, it is quite understandable that those with most invested in the single currency should wish to head off both a Greek default and the domino effect that would surely follow it. Yet the pressure applied by such figures as Rehn and Lagarde* counts as interference in a sovereign nation’s political affairs and alerts us to the serious democratic and legal issues raised by this episode. Just as worrying, if not more, is the now-explicit threat to Greece’s EU membership in the event of her leaving the single currency. As the Forbes journalist Maha Atal makes clear, such legal waters are uncharted, as no EU treaty makes provision for a nation to leave the single currency. Nonetheless, she suggests, the choice has been taken to use EU membership as a stick with which to ‘force compliance with loans-for-cuts agreements in Greece, Italy or other beleaguered countries’, implicitly suggesting ‘that the euro is a fundamental condition for EU membership’. This represents a deeply uncomfortable development for the ten EU member states outside the Eurozone. They, one imagines, will now be hoping for a swift, trouble-free approval of the debt deal in Greece as fervently as anyone in Paris or Berlin.

*The IMF head, overheard in conversation with the Greek finance minister Evangelos Venizelos in Washington recently: ‘What Greece am I talking to, the one who endorses reforms, who accepts austerity or the one who doesn’t?’

Paul Brand, Catch21 Ambassador

“We know that young people have a view, but too often they don’t have a voice. Catch21′s work is vital in encouraging 18-24 year-olds to participate in the political debate so that British democracy really does mean rule by the people – all people.”

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Catch21 believes in democracy. The problem as we see it is that for democracy to function properly, everyone needs to have the same level of information. However due to inability, apathy and inaccessibility this is not always the case. Our aim is to remedy these factors by providing the access and information to participate and by empowering young people to make them feel a part of their communities.